A working session on the seven strategic themes shaping Howdens' 2026 technology agenda — from integration mesh and CRM modernisation through agentic automation and ITSM consolidation. Mapped against Customertimes' delivery experience, with proposed sequencing.
This is a working QBR, not a status review. The first third looks back — delivery scorecard, performance, what shipped. The middle is where the real work happens — a portfolio walk through the seven strategic themes we believe define Howdens' 2026 technology agenda. The last block lands on roadmap, decisions, and owners.
A flat UK kitchen market. A vertically integrated, near-sourced supply chain that's already a quiet competitive moat. Manufacturing AI moving from foundation to next step. £30 million of inflationary headwind to absorb through productivity. And a depot estate with line of sight to 1,000 UK locations. The narrative is share gain through execution, not market tailwind.
"SAP Digital Manufacturing offers the power, connectivity, and real-time data and analytics we need to succeed in the future of manufacturing."
Howdens has, on its own, built one of the more impressive operational technology stacks in UK retail manufacturing. SAP Digital Manufacturing on the production side. Creatio in depots. Microsoft Azure for cloud and AI. AWS for selected hosting. Bazaarvoice, Gigya, the Trade App. Each is well-chosen. What's missing is the connective tissue — and the productivity, customer intelligence, and AI velocity that only sit on top of a connected foundation.
The stack spans SAP (manufacturing & data), Creatio (depot CRM), Azure (AI & cloud), AWS (hosting), Gigya (consumer data). Every new initiative pays an integration tax. The connective layer is the obvious soft spot.
SAP DM has moved Howdens from foundation to next-step AI on the production side. Chip is in market on the trade side but narrow in scope. The depot, designer, planner, and back-office layers have effectively no AI yet.
Trade customer data sits in Creatio, SAP, Gigya, the Trade App, Bazaarvoice, and Click & Collect. There is no single profile, no predictive churn model, no next-best-product engine, no depot conversion benchmarking grounded in one customer truth.
The £30M inflationary offset is explicit. Initiatives that can't be tagged against a productivity number — depot hours saved, automation deflection, planning cycle compression — will struggle for air. The portfolio needs that lens applied at design time, not at the board.
Each theme is positioned as a sequenceable workstream — independently valuable, but cumulatively building the platform Howdens needs for the next three years. Reference cases attached where Customertimes has shipped a directly comparable pattern. These are working drafts — expect to refine before the session.
The single highest-leverage move on the board. Every other theme on this page gets faster, cheaper, and safer once a governed integration layer sits between SAP, Creatio, Azure, AWS, and the rest. Customertimes' ISG-recognised MuleSoft + SAP integration depth is the direct match — proven at Bayer across regulated, multi-cloud commercial and supply chain landscapes.
The Creatio rollout did the job of unifying depot processes. The question for 2026 is whether the no-code platform scales to the AI, integration, and commercial-data ambition on the next horizon. Medisca made this exact move with Customertimes — Creatio out, modern CRM in, data activation as the prize.
Trade customer data is currently spread across SAP, Creatio, the Trade App, Bazaarvoice, and Gigya. No single profile means no churn model, no predictive CLV, no next-best-product, no real depot benchmarking. The unified-profile layer is the prerequisite for half the agent ideas that follow.
The £30M inflationary offset target makes this theme the easiest sell in the room. Power Automate is the natural fit given Howdens' Azure / Microsoft posture, with Salesforce Flow + MuleSoft completing the picture on commercial process. Every automation tagged against a measurable hour-saved or cost-out number.
Chip is the proof point — it works, it ships, trade customers use it. The question now is what the second, third, and fourth agents look like, and whether they all need to live on Azure. A pragmatic multi-cloud agent estate — Azure OpenAI where Chip already lives, Agentforce where the CRM is — under one governance layer.
Trade customer service today is largely depot-mediated and high-touch. Some of that depth is the moat — but plenty of inbound is repetitive: order status, fitting questions, returns, install queries, credit. An agentic service layer takes the routine deflectable interactions off depot staff and surfaces the rest with context.
The CIO-friendly cost lever. Once Salesforce becomes the platform for commercial service (Theme 06), the next rational step is consolidating internal ITSM onto the same backbone — same data model, same agent layer, same governance. Replaces stand-alone ITSM licensing and removes another fragmentation surface.
Two anchor references for this QBR — Bayer Consumer Health US for the integration mesh + agentic platform pattern, and Medisca for the Creatio-to-modern-CRM migration playbook. A handful of supporting references attached for the adjacent themes.
Customertimes is currently delivering the agentic transformation pattern for Bayer CH US — multi-agent orchestration over SAP, Salesforce, Anaplan, Databricks, and Veeva, with a governed knowledge and integration fabric underneath. Directly relevant to Theme 01 and Theme 05.
The shape of the engagement — multi-cloud, regulated, large commercial footprint, productivity programme (SHAPE) running alongside top-line ambition — is the closest analogue Customertimes has in flight to where Howdens is heading in 2026.
Medisca undertook the exact platform decision Howdens is now weighing — moving off a Creatio-class CRM onto a scalable, AI-native commercial platform with proper data activation. Customertimes led the migration end-to-end.
Direct relevance to Theme 02. The lessons from Medisca are particularly useful: how to phase the cutover, how to preserve depot-equivalent local autonomy, and how to use the migration moment to activate latent CRM data rather than just re-platforming what already existed.
Live production reference for Theme 05 (consumer-focused AI apps in field contexts) and Theme 02 (CT Mobile as designer / depot field tooling). Salesforce + Agentforce + CT Mobile combined into a single agentic field workflow.
Bacardi: Microsoft Copilot institutional knowledge agent for field sales. Global CPG: Snowflake + Databricks forecasting platform with measured 35% MAPE reduction. Supports Theme 04 (Power Automate / Copilot) and Theme 03 (Databricks foundation).
Initial draft for discussion. The principle: foundation first (Theme 01), then the two parallel value tracks (CRM modernisation on the commercial side, automation on the productivity side), with the AI and service themes layered on once the foundation can carry them. ITSM consolidation is the closing move once Salesforce is the proven service backbone.